Internet file availability shortage

[Red Squirrel]

I noticed one thing has been becoming more and more popular. Instead of offering a file as a download directly from an actual server, which is reliable, lot of sites now only offer downloads as torrents, which are unreliable, and depend on many 3rd party systems and networks, and have tons of network overhead as oposed to a single http/ftp download off a server that is housed in a datacenter instead of a home machine or multiple home machines, that host different parts.

If this continues to grow, it will come to a point where getting anything online will be a big challenge. instead of relying on reliable internet servers that have raid, backups, environment control, redundant links, etc, we'll be relying on unmanaged clusters of home machines spread all over. If one site goes down, you're screwed. It's like making a raid 0 with 10 random old hard drives instead of using a raid 5 with reliable hard drives.

Just thought I would share my feelings on the future of the internet, if this phenomenon continues. I've seen everything from 5GB files to 500KB files being offered only as torrents. It's sad really, specially when its a 500KB file that would normally take seconds to download if actually hosted on a http/ftp server.

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:4532, old post ID:36140